Retaining PM Talent Effectively

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Organizational Project Management   Talent Management  

Organizations have a lot of major projects ahead of them. I guess that’s always the case, but right now the need to invest in a stable, scalable recovery from the COVID-19 crisis means that the ability to consistently deliver successful projects is critical. Part of that comes from leaders selecting the right priorities and approving the right initiatives, but a lot of it comes from project managers enabling those business outcomes through effective project delivery.

As a result, it’s imperative that organizations do everything they can to retain the project managers they have. Regardless of how capable they are of hiring fresh talent, the time needed for those new hires to become familiar with the organization, people and work environment will slow down the speed of recovery. For at least the rest of this year—and I would argue quite considerably longer—the ability to control the rate of project management turnover could be a determining factor in whether an organization successfully recovers.

That’s not going to be easy to achieve. Project management has traditionally been a highly portable profession—PMs have been able to move freely between organizations and even across industries. For some roles, that portability has dropped in recent years because of the increasing focus on business outcomes and the consequent understanding of the…

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